Tom Noyes' Commerce Signals Out To Disrupt Data-Based Marketing

A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape: Tom Noyes, Founder and CEO, Commerce Signals

Marketing is becoming a more exact science. And a host of data providers and marketing technologies have emerged to support marketer’s efforts to connect marketing activity to business outcomes. One such company is Commerce Signals. It aggregates insights from transaction data from credit card purchases through a secure platform that provides publishers, advertisers and agencies purchase insights in close to real time.

“Would you like to measure your advertising or marketing efforts with actual retail sales from the country’s largest payment networks? What if you could submit your own requests for insights 24/7 and get deterministic results back? Would you like to optimize with data from purchases made just 2 days ago? In our controlled environment, advertisers can directly access the right insights directly from the source,” says Tom Noyes, founder and CEO of Commerce Signals.

According to Noyes, banks spent $1.5 billion dollars in the U.S. alone building huge data lakes over the last three to four years. These technology wonders are resources with enormous potential, but are significantly under tapped. Noyes aims to change that.

“Bank data is organized in a structure and available but has no commercial construct that’s worked in deployment. Our commercial model enables banks to create data products that can go to market quickly, all while allowing them to control use and price. Today we have four very simple data products covering 70% of US card transaction volume. These products are focused on advertising and measurement which buyers know how to buy, created out of the bank's existing data lakes. Banks are pivoting from a model of control to their traditional model of commerce enablement” says Noyes.

“For example, most purchase-based measurement comes in eight or more weeks after a campaign has aired, which doesn’t allow for optimization of campaigns while they’re in flight. Commerce Signals provides the link to those big data lakes from the banks credit card transaction This aggregated data allows marketers to assess sales impact and refine what tactics will next and best influence purchase decisions.”

Noyes believes his data and measurement company is on track to build a powerful attribution and optimization engine for marketers, agencies and publishers alike.

“We’re growing at 300 percent a quarter right now so we’re in a very high growth mode. But we just came out of the cradle, we’ve gone from ground zero in July to be a $6 million dollar run rate by the first quarter of next year. We’ve got 6 publishers on the platform today and by the end of the December we’ll have 12. My biggest problem is how we support demand from 20 companies a month. So it’s a great problem to have. Visa loves it because it helps them maintain privacy and demonstrate to retailers that they could be a friend and do more than just help them process a payment, same with First Data. The publishers love it because it helps them be a more effective advertiser,” says Noyes.

Commerce Signal and its databridge product positions itself as a neutral middleman, acting on the data under the explicit permissions of whoever owns it, which creates transparency and trust. “That’s our phase one vision. We do believe that in just measurement alone we have an opportunity to grow into a $300-million-dollar revenue business in the U.S. And I think that’s a feed for what we want to do long term which is a whole lot bigger than measurement.”

Noyes grew up in Michigan for the first 12 years of his life and then his dad was a VP of manufacturing at NI Industries and set up seven manufacturing plants in Tennessee and Virginia. He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee from age 14 on and then went to the University of Tennessee to become an aerospace engineer and was recruited and went to work for NASA in Houston right out of college.

“I worked on the space shuttle guidance navigation and control which is a really cool thing to do. I thought it was the greatest job in the world to get to work with astronauts every week and have Neil Armstrong’s old house is right across the street. I had seven astronauts within a block of me. Just great people, a great community, but what I realized is you could love your job and your boss loves the job you do but if Congress kills your funding and you’re all fired. Something about that seems inherently unfair,” says Noyes.

He then went on to earn his MBA at the University of Houston and went into banking and helped the banks adapt on a mainframe and some of the new network technologies of the day. From NASA he went to First Union National Bank and moved to Charlotte. “They were just getting out of mainframes and into object-oriented programming and PCs and software. I still remember the funniest story of – these folks had never seen a computer or a mouse before. In 1996 I visited First Union data center in Virginia. One of the workers there said, “I really like this new PC and I love the built-in coffee cup holder.’ He was talking about the CD-rom tray and I thought he was joking and he pushed the button and there was a coffee stain around it. It’s amazing how things have changed and it’s fun to bring change into new places,” says Noyes.

Noyes wanted more direct control over his future and though about developing a business on his own. “I’d gotten to a stage in my life, seeing Citi implode in 2007, I was pretty confident in my skills and the ability to get at least a sense of seed funding behind me and my own personal risk tolerance had improved so that I could take on a little more risk. And I really wanted to give it a shot because having my own company has been a dream. I love building things and that’s what makes me tick. Helping companies collaborate and measure is one of the great problems which needs to be solved.”

He asked a friend who was the CEO of a VC-backed firm, 41st Parameter, to review his business plan. “He said, ‘Listen, you need to come work for me. You could never ever start your own business no matter your own technology prowess. You’ll fall on your ass. In order to run a startup, you’ve got to be in one first,’ and he was absolutely right on that,” says Noyes. He then joined the company. Experian then bought them for $320 million in 2012.

“When I joined 41st they had $250,000 of annual revenue, in 18 months running sales and marketing, we got them into all the banks and some of the big retailers. After the exit I was doing my own angel investing and messing around with the five guys in garage kind of companies. And the only good thing about getting older is your friends go on to do neat things like Dan Schulman who was my client friend at Amex went to be CEO of PayPal. Osama Bedier who left PayPal, went to be head of Google Commerce”

After a short stint at Google to work on their payment platform, Noyes started Commerce Signals in 2012. As for the future?

“Our grand hope with Commerce Signals is that measurement is just our phase one, that as I mentioned, that the core function of any data marketplace has to be measurement because of that uniqueness around data. Given that data is in infinite supply, price must be based upon use, and use must be controlled. Measurement is the key pricing function for any data market. Measurement also allows us to predict how data relates to one another.

For example, Google’s initial “pagerank algorithm” was a crude form of measurement. The value of any specific link is based upon the number of links that are associated with it. Obviously it is not possible to ascertain the economic value of a link in this approach, only the relative value vs alternatives. Thus Google’s approach works well for public “free” information, not for private data. The value of private data is based upon use, as is its availability.We seek to enable small data sets and what we call data democratization to work ”

“I’m definitely passionate about how we engage consumers and use their data in a way that would be very privacy friendly and make it work for everyone.”

I am the Founding Managing Director of the SITO Institute for Consumer Behavior and Location Sciences. Formerly I was a Forbes staff writer, Chief Insights Officer and founder of Forbes Insights and the CMO Practice. I am the co-author of "Profitable Brilliance: How Professi...